Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in the UK, has been granted a conditional pardon in light of evidence that she was a victim of domestic abuse and coercive and controlling behaviour.
Ellis was executed in 1955, aged 28, after she shot and killed her partner, David Blakely, whom she met two years earlier while working in the nightclub she managed.
The application for a pardon was brought by four of Ellis’s grandchildren who said her responsibility was profoundly shaped by domestic abuse, trauma and circumstances that were never properly recognised at her trial.
On Wednesday, the deputy prime minister and justice secretary, David Lammy, announced in parliament that, on his advice, King Charles had granted Ellis a conditional pardon.
It reflects the fact that, had the case been heard today, it is possible partial defences of loss of control or diminished responsibility could have been put before a jury. If accepted, they might have reduced her conviction from murder to manslaughter.
Full article https://www.theguardian.com/law/2026/jul/08/ruth-ellis-last-woman-hanged-uk-posthumous-conditional-pardon
Ruth Ellis was a murderer. She doesn’t deserve a pardon
As a grounds of excusing murder, this is somewhat dangerous, and rather demeaning to women. Apart from the fact that she clearly appears to have been a woman with a will of her own, however many mistakes she made (and she managed, after all, to divorce an abusive husband, divorce not being easy in 1951), the argument could be applied to untold thousands of women in Britain – alas, as I know from having listened to the stories of hundreds of them myself in a British hospital. None of them shot their abusers, however, and most managed in time to escape them, though they often found someone similar.
Telegraph article at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/07/08/ruth-ellis-murderer-doesnt-deserve-pardon/
Also in full at https://archive.is/c6lZD